Dr. Lucy Atkinson

Hi! My name is Dr. Lucy Atkinson and I am an associate professor in the School of Advertising & PR at the University of Texas at Austin. My research looks at environmental communication (including advertising, AI, social media, video games, and VR) in the context of climate change and sustainability and the impacts on health, political engagement, and environmental justice. It is firmly rooted in a normative concern for a well-functioning society and the ways in which communication can serve as a means of both empowering and holding to account governments, corporations, organizations and consumers with respect to the challenges and opportunities around issues like climate change. My focus is on how media can facilitate or hinder individual and collective health and well being while supporting civic engagement and equitable, sustainable communities.

In building my program of research, I take a highly interdisciplinary approach, bringing together the fields of mass communication, political science, environmental studies, psychology and sociology. I am a mixed-methods researcher, drawing on quantitative, computational and qualitative methods, including experiments, surveys, natural language processing, generative AI, and in-depth interviews.

I have received research funding from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and Merck/Meta (Facebook). My work has appeared in top-ranked flagship journals, like the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Consumer Behavior, Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, Consumption Markets & Culture, Science Communication and Environmental Communication.

I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my M.A. at New York University and my B.A. at McGill University. Before pursuing my doctorate, I worked for several years as a newspaper reporter and editor in New York.